The election results in Bengal have delivered a thrashing for the Left Front. Kerala ousted them with a smaller margin. The news channels have been gaga over a giant killer called Mamata Banerjee. She probably is. Was there any other option? The Congress did not have any great leader in Bengal, as it does not in many other states. The rise of state leaders in the Congress is taboo. The BJP doesn’t exist in either of the states. If the Congress does win a majority in a state it is the ‘high command’ which will conduct a lucky draw and appoint a CM. That will not be so in Bengal. Mind you, our media almost painted Mamata as a villain during the Nandigram and Shingur episodes.
The questions mostly asked in the media are about how the Left had become arrogant and about Nandigram and Shingur. About how the Left got decimated. The real question that needs asking is how the Bengalis suffered the communists for over three decades. Bengalis consider themselves artistic, intelligent or intellectuals and yet they fell for communism for such a long period. Perhaps the CPM and its gangs of cadres conducted operations that kept them suppressed all these years. The culture of tall talk in public and deception and violence on the ground is a common feature of communists.
One must bear in mind that the Congress is also a Communist party in disguise. Right from the time Jawaharlal Nehru took charge almost all the policies of the government were based on communist ideology. Modern day Indian history was also being written by communists of the JNU types. Suppressing and discrediting private entrepreneurship was a policy long followed by the Congress, which is another feature of communist ideology. If the practice in Bengal and Kerala was to marginalise the majority Hindu community and increase the Muslim population as vote banks it has been no different with the Congress either. Even now, much of our financial policies and budgets have elements of communist ideology.
Now then, whatever the communist ideology or their misdeeds is another story. What one needs to ponder is why our media was so obsessed with the members of the Left or their spokespersons. If you look back at the two decades since the private channels explosion hardly a day passed when quite a few communist faces didn’t feature prominently on every national issue. As if Bengal was really some reflection of national agenda. The Yechuris, the Nilotpals, the Rajas, the Brindas, the Karats, the Dasguptas and many more. After the 2009 general elections one hoped the communists would be kept out of the TV having lost badly but that did not happen.
In the years prior to the TV explosion the main newspaper of the nation, Times of India was almost the champion of the communists. Of course, it helps that their head quarter was in Kolkatta for a long time. Among the TV channels NDTV has to be their greatest platform. Again, it helps that NDTVs owners are directly related to communists. So what are NDTV and CNN-IBN going to do now? Now that their heroes are buried in these elections one wonders what’s next for them. I don’t really expect NDTV to change colours too much but the other channels can surely learn a lesson in not allowing disproportionate voice to a redundant and rotting ideology.
If the TV channels haven’t found wisdom one can rejoice that the people of Bengal have finally woken up and booted out the communists. This has been done in a manner similar to the decimation of Laloo Yadav in Bihar. The darlings of our media are slowly being booted out. Do you now need more proof how out of touch with people our media is as much as most political parties are? One way or another I hope this is the death of the communist ideology and that it disappears from our nation.
